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part of vegan legend Sunday, January 15 2017
This afternoon I drove to Woodstock to attend the "Hudson Valley Writers Resist" event being held at the Bearsville Theatre as part of a nationwide rejection and defiance of the incoming presidential regime of one Donald J. Trump. Gretchen was one of the few poets invited to read, so it seemed I should be a supportive husband. When I arrived in Bearsville, the place was already mobbed with parked vehicles, forcing me to park on the shoulder of Route 212. Inside, the place was full of all the usual people one sees at Woodstock events: concerned-looking grey-haired liberals similar to the ones who attend your local Unitarian church. There were a smattering of African Americans, but they were all featured writers, musicians, or poets. I saw a smattering of people I knew: the woman who owns the bookstore that Gretchen works at, the sister of the guy who built our house, and then Chris & Kirsti from last night, and (later) my dentist, who also played keyboards on a hit song back in the late 1960s. I couldn't see Gretchen anywhere, but most of the people were in the darkened theatre itself at the time. I went to the bar to get a beer and was told to "just make a contribution" at the donation table. Yes, folks, the beer was free! (It's kind of sad that free beer no longer has that aura of dangerous excitement it still had only a few years ago.)
Unexpectedly, it seemed the event was on schedule, because the music wound down in time for the 3:30pm poetry segment. And Gretchen was the second poet to read. She read exclusively from poems in her new (and still-unpublished) collection about men incarcerated in maximum-security prison. Towards the end, she made a strong and surprisingly-prolonged pitch that the conscientious do-gooders in the room adopt a vegan diet as part of their commitment to a just and ecologically-sustainable world. And then she read a poem about a real-life prisoner who decided to go vegan as part of his new morality. It was a powerful presentation, and (as always) I was proud of her.
A couple poets later, a gentleman named Sparrow took the stage. He looked like Santa Claus and had a delightful wit as he read a series of incredibly short poems, some only five or six words long. He noted that he had written thousands of poems in his life and had, just as a matter of course, written 20 or 30 about Donald Trump over the years. He read a few of these, though they weren't quite as good as the ones he'd read earlier.
It was a good event for a good cause, but it wasn't really my scene, so after I congratulated Gretchen on her performance, I took my leave, taking with me the empty containers from two different vegan bake goods Gretchen had baked and brought to be sold (they'd sold out, of course).
I stopped at Hurley Ridge market for vegan sushi, juice, mushrooms, corn chips, and beer. A woman who is part of the local vegan scene (the one who used to date Jeff Buckley) saw me there and she and I talked briefly about Gretchen's vegan evangelism at Writers Resist, which was evidently already part of vegan legend.
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